The slave who loved caviar

The SlaveI picked this up after seeing a snippet of a foreign film that was based in part on this book Author Micheline Maurel was in academia before the second world war but when France was taken over she found herself in a Nazi occupied zone continuing her academic career in Lyon but secretly working for the underground She is noted as one of the Heroines of the Resistance and has received several French National medals. The slave ship Captured in 1943 she was deported to Ravensbruck near Berlin then to Neubrandenburg a women s camp in the Ravensbruck complex Naively with a band of similarly naive French detainees she believed everything was as advertised that each camp was merely a detention camp that hospital camps were indeed for the sick that every relocation was for the better and as all French hoped that the war would be over in a few months. Save bookmarks chrome She was in Neubrandenburg for 20 months constantly beaten systematically starved treated as an animal among animals and forced to work in a German airline factory surviving only due to the camaraderie of her fellow French sufferers As the Russians and Americans closed in on each side the camp officials and SS became increasingly desperate and the treatment and degradation worsened until the camp was opened and the starved and weakened prisoners were forced to march among frightened refugees and military to an unknown destination. The slave and the lion story moral This articulate memoir is a fast graphic and intelligent story of Maurel s experiences Originally titled An Ordinary Camp it is an extraordinary tale that is difficult to put aside Her invocation against concentration camps in the future is wrenching If you can find a copy it s worth adding to your personal histories Mass Market Paperback Unlike so many other memoirs by Holocaust survivors that I have read this author had a lot of focus on the daily and constant search for food the rations provided to them in the camps by the Nazis were meager at best and often taken away for the least infractions It was detailed in the descriptions of camp life from the constant calls for assembly and standing in the elements for hours at a time to the always present deaths of those too weak to go on to the stealing among fellow prisoners as well as the friendships that developed She also described the conditions encountered on her journey home after leaving the camp and making her way with other fellow French women through the Russian and then American lines through Germany Belgium and finally France and a bittersweet reunion with family as a completely different person Recommended for anyone interested in WWII and the Holocaust Mass Market Paperback This book is why the phrase Don t judge a book by it s cover came to be This book is actually one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read These early memoirs were often marketed in this pulp fictional demeaning way There is now a new cover thankfully Micheline Maurel was a literature Professor and a poet She joined up with the French Resistance and after a year was arrested tortured and deported along with literal train loads of French non Jews to some pretty horrible places from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck She begins her story setting foot in Ravensbruck and ends when she against all odds actually makes it home She speaks as if she were right there with you and answers every question you would ask her if she were your lost friend come home And she s a Professor Poet so you know its well written The French memoirs are a little unique and I m thrilled that these early ones are being translated and made available again Mass Market Paperback